I was wondering when someone would do this...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/cartoon/2009/may/25/david-cameron-mps-expenses-conservatives-election
This is not the place for a rant on British politics, the once-leftwing Guardian's mutual masturbation fest with the Tory leader, or the way the 'expenses row' is a plot cooked up by the Barclay Brothers and their anti-EU Conservative friends (not least because any mention of the Barclay brothers - reclusive small-scale Rupert Murdochs - gets blogs closed down in this free country of ours). However, one result of this highly-spun 'scandal' and the genuine but confused public anger it has created is that not a day has passed in the last three weeks without some political commentator or TV presenter using the word 'guillotine', '1789', 'revolution' etc etc. and, begorrah, yes, even Marat and Robespierre (the only revolutionaries anyone here has ever heard of) get the odd namecheck. I don't read newspapers anymore (they're full of crap), so I dunno what the other cartoonists have being doing, but Martin Rowson - generally, one of the good guys - regularly 'quotes' 18thc cartoons, (usually Hogarth) and today did this one.
Incidentally, the oft-quoted legend about the 1794 (?) original http://www.angelfire.com/ca6/frenchrevolution89/robespierre3.JPG is that the cartoonist was guillotined for daring to criticise Robespierre. Like so much else, this appears to be bollocks - the cartoon is probably post-Thermidor, and curator Claudette Hould says there's no record of anyone being killed for it (though if anyone knows any more about it, please post!).

Comments

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Like so much else, this appears to be bollocks
And this pretty much is. Never heard that legend, because clearly that caricature is post-Thermidor. Besides, it's sometimes dated to 1795, and the imagery is clearly Thermidorian, with the obsession of cemetaries, graves and corpses. They enter in a macabre imagery that is completely foreign to the pre-Thermidor world. The Late Montagnard/Robespierriste imagery is full of light, eyes of the Supreme Being, Rousseauiste themes, and girls in white gowns, tricolor sashes and flowers (see icon for an example, but there's another image I'm thinking of which I can't really find at the moment). You'd say, or Schama would say, that it's obviously State Propaganda. Yes. Duh. But then the Thermidorian imagery, even if it's full of mountains of corpses and infernal themes, which they probably ripped off from Burke, is also State Propaganda. (And, yes, if you wonder, I want to study those themes to death. Pun.)

Besides, the real events had nothing to do with that obvious neo-Thermidorian reconstruction (like: La Révolution française, Wajda and all those mockeries of historical films) of a heroic caricaturist who gets guillotined for his courageous attempt: because there has never been any "courageous" Thermidorian (what an oxymoron) to decide to "confront" Robespierre's "evil dictatorship" and his "outlawing of press freedom" by making a wicked caricature to throw him into a dictator-fit. Damn. That sounds like a bad movie script.

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

And btw, I'll allow myself to unsurprisingly say that new caricature in the Guardian is sick. It reminds me the New Yorker one (http://www.blastmilk.com/decollete/decapitation-miscellany/the_guillotine/robespierre_new_yorker.php). Which just confirms, like what Wahnich says in her essay on Terror and Terrorism, that we still live in a (sick) world with Thermidorian imagery. Revolting.